Hillary Clinton

Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, the eldest child of Hugh Rodham, a small textile business owner, and Dorothy Howell Rodham, a homemaker ^[1]. She grew up in Park Ridge, a middle-class suburb northwest of the city, with two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony. Her father was a staunch Republican and a demanding parent; her mother, who had endured an unstable childhood, encouraged her daughter to pursue education and independence ^[2].

As a student at Maine East and later Maine South High School, she was active in student council, the National Honor Society, and her Methodist youth group, whose minister took the group to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago in 1962 ^[2]. She began her political life as a young Republican, campaigning as a teenage volunteer for Barry Goldwater in 1964.

In 1965 she enrolled at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where her politics shifted during the upheavals of the Vietnam era. She served as president of the student government, and in 1969 she delivered the first student commencement address in the college's history, a speech that drew national attention and a mention in Life magazine ^[1]. She graduated with a degree in political science and entered Yale Law School that fall.

At Yale, Rodham focused on children and family law, working with the Yale Child Study Center and serving on the board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action. She also met a fellow law student from Arkansas named Bill Clinton, beginning a partnership that would define both of their careers ^[1]. After receiving her law degree in 1973, she worked for the Children's Defense Fund under Marian Wright Edelman, and in 1974 she joined the staff of the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment inquiry into President Richard Nixon ^[3].

Rather than pursue a Washington or New York legal career, she moved to Arkansas in 1974, taught at the University of Arkansas School of Law, and married Bill Clinton in October 1975, initially keeping her maiden name ^[2]. She joined the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock in 1977 and later became its first female partner. That same year President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, which she went on to chair ^[3].

When Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978, she became the state's first lady while continuing her legal practice. She led the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee in 1983, pushing reforms that included teacher testing and smaller class sizes, and she cofounded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families ^[3]. The National Law Journal twice named her one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America ^[1]. The couple's daughter, Chelsea, was born in 1980.

Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, and Hillary Clinton entered the White House as a first lady with an unusually public policy portfolio. In 1993 the president named her to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, an assignment without precedent for a presidential spouse ^[4]. The resulting plan for universal coverage collapsed in Congress in 1994 amid opposition from insurers and lawmakers of both parties, a defeat that shaped her later, more incremental approach to health policy ^[4].

She recovered political ground by working on narrower measures. She helped build support for the Children's Health Insurance Program, enacted in 1997, which extended coverage to millions of children in working families, and she promoted the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 ^[3]. In September 1995 she addressed the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, declaring that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, a line that became a touchstone of the global women's movement ^[5].

Her White House years also brought sustained scrutiny. The Whitewater investigation into an Arkansas land deal led to her testimony before a federal grand jury in 1996, though she was never charged with wrongdoing ^[1]. In 1998 the revelation of her husband's affair with a White House intern, and his subsequent impeachment and acquittal, placed her marriage under intense public examination. Her 1996 book It Takes a Village became a bestseller, and her 2003 memoir Living History sold more than a million copies in its first month ^[2].

In 2000, while still first lady, Clinton ran for the United States Senate from New York, a state where she had never lived. She defeated Republican congressman Rick Lazio by a comfortable margin, becoming the first first lady ever elected to public office and the first woman elected to the Senate from New York ^[1]. She won reelection in 2006 with about 67 percent of the vote.

In the Senate she served on the Armed Services Committee and cultivated a reputation for detailed work and cross-party cooperation. After the September 11 attacks she secured federal funds for New York's recovery and pressed for health monitoring for first responders ^[4]. Her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, which she later called a mistake, became a persistent liability in Democratic politics ^[4].

Clinton entered the 2008 presidential race as the favorite for the Democratic nomination but lost a long primary battle to Senator Barack Obama. She won roughly 18 million primary votes, and in her concession speech she said her supporters had put about 18 million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling ^[6]. The contest established her as the most successful female presidential candidate in American history to that point and set up her surprising next chapter: joining her former rival's cabinet.

President Obama nominated Clinton as Secretary of State, and she was confirmed in January 2009. Over four years she visited 112 countries, at the time more than any previous secretary, and worked to repair alliances strained during the previous decade ^[5]. She made what she called smart power the theme of her tenure, pairing traditional diplomacy with development aid, internet freedom initiatives, and advocacy for women and girls as a core foreign policy interest ^[5].

Her term included the American response to the Arab Spring uprisings, the assembly of international sanctions against Iran that preceded later nuclear negotiations, the announced pivot of American attention toward Asia, and support for the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya ^[4]. The September 2012 attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, prompted multiple congressional investigations and years of political controversy ^[4].

Clinton stepped down in February 2013. Her use of a private email server for official correspondence while secretary later became the subject of an FBI investigation; the bureau's director announced in July 2016 that no charges would be recommended while criticizing her handling of classified material ^[7]. Her memoir of the period, Hard Choices, appeared in 2014.

Clinton announced her second presidential campaign in April 2015 and, after a contested primary against Senator Bernie Sanders, accepted the Democratic nomination in July 2016, the first woman ever nominated for president by a major American party ^[6]. She chose Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate and campaigned on expanding health coverage, immigration reform, and continuity with the Obama administration.

In the general election against Republican Donald Trump she won the national popular vote by nearly 2.9 million ballots, about 48 percent to 46 percent, yet lost the Electoral College 304 to 227 after narrow defeats in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania ^[6]. The result stunned pollsters and both parties, and Clinton examined the loss, including the effects of the late reopening of the email inquiry and Russian interference documented by American intelligence agencies, in her 2017 book What Happened ^[7].

Since 2016 she has remained active as an author, commentator, and advocate. She cofounded Onward Together, a group supporting progressive organizations, published books including the 2021 political thriller State of Terror with novelist Louise Penny, launched a podcast, and in 2023 joined Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs as a professor of practice ^[2]. She and Bill Clinton continue their work through the Clinton Foundation, and they became grandparents when Chelsea Clinton's children were born beginning in 2014.

Anyone asking who was Hillary Clinton, or rather who she is, since she remains an active public figure, confronts a career of firsts. She was the first first lady with a postgraduate degree and an independent professional career of her own standing, the first to be elected to the Senate, and the first woman to top a major party's presidential ticket ^[1]. Among Hillary Clinton achievements, historians typically list the Children's Health Insurance Program, the Beijing declaration on women's rights, her Senate work for New York after September 11, and her rebuilding of American diplomacy after 2009 ^[3].

Her legacy is also contested. Critics on the right pursued her through decades of investigations, while some on the left faulted her Iraq vote, her ties to Wall Street donors, and her caution. Gallup polling named her the most admired woman in America a record 22 times, even as her favorability ratings swung sharply across her career, a paradox that scholars of gender and politics continue to study ^[8].

The basic Hillary Clinton facts, a suburban Chicago childhood, Wellesley and Yale, Arkansas, the White House, the Senate, the State Department, and 66 million presidential votes, describe a life lived almost entirely in the public arena. Whatever the final judgment, her career widened the boundaries of what American women could plausibly seek in politics, and the candidates who followed her, in both parties, campaigned on ground she helped clear ^[6].